Access in PowerPoint

Integrate a Microsoft Access database within a PowerPoint slide.

Author:Naresh Nichani

Product/Version: All PowerPoint Versions

Date Created: February 16, 2009Last Updated: February 28, 2009

Naresh Nichani is a Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Microsoft Access based in Chennai, India. Naresh
runs a software development firm that specializes in Visual Basic development and Office integration.
He enjoys programming with Microsoft technologies as they are fairly easy to use and developers can build fairly complex solutions for
customers with visually appealing interfaces quickly. Naresh does custom development.

First of all, this is not a tutorial rather it is a walkthrough that shows proof of concept of integrating
a Microsoft Access database within a PowerPoint slide. What's more? the sample presentation that has been provided let's you use any Access
database as the source for your presentation slides!

You can download the sample presentation and database files here
(140 kb). You will need to have both Microsoft Access and PowerPoint installed on the same system for this to work also it
works best if versions of both the products are identical, as in PowerPoint 2003 and Access 2003 or PowerPoint 2007 and Access 2007.

In this proof of concept example I have created an Access database called Inventory.mdb -- the database contains two tables
Product and ProductFeatures, details as below:

Product table is a listing of products.

ProductFeatures is a listing of features for each product -- each product can have many features.

The Product and ProductFeatures are joined on the ID field in the Product table, and on
the MasterID field in the ProductFeature table.

Follow these steps:

Unzip the ZIP file you downloaded. You'll find two files: a PowerPoint PPT file, and an Access MDB file.

Start PowerPoint, and open the “PPT from MS-Access.ppt” file within the unzipped archive.

PowerPoint 2003 users may see a warning message window while opening the file. Click the
Enable Macros option, and continue opening the file. Also set your security level
to Medium using the Tools | Macros | Security option.

PowerPoint 2007 users will see a warning within a bar below the Ribbon -- click the
Options button, and select the Enable this content
option in the resultant dialog box.

Play the presentation in slide show mode (or press F5).

In slide show mode, click the prominent button that says “Generate PPT from Access”.

This will summon Step 1 of the wizard that
you see in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Importing an Access database

Select the sample Access database called "Inventory.mdb" within the unzipped archive, as shown in
Figure 2. this tool will also work with any other Microsoft Access database. The sample database is
just for the demo to get you started.

Figure 2: Select a sample database

Click Next, and you are prompted to select data for the Title (slide title) as shown in
Figure 3. The Title is what will appear in the header of each slide.

Figure 3: Choose content for your slide titles

We want data from the Product table in the Title header, so we select Product from the dropdown, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Choose a source table for the slide titles

The wizard now displays all fields in the Product table, as shown in Figure 5.
We must select which of these fields from the Product table will show in the Title. Since we want to show both the
Manufacturer and the Model, I add these to the list on the right.

Figure 5: Choose fields for the slide titles

Click Next button, and you are prompted to select the Detail table (source for the text bullets), as shown in Figure 6. The Detail table is a bulleted list for each slide. Here we select the ProductFeatures table.

Figure 6: Choose a source table for the bulleted lists

Next we select Feature as the field to show in PowerPoint's bulleted list area (see Figure 7).

Figure 7: Choose fields for the bulleted lists

Click Next button, and you must tell the Wizard how to relate Title Table and Detail Table. Here I choose to relate on ID and
MasterID as these are the fields on which these two tables are related (see Figure 8).

Figure 8: Relate fields

We basically clicked on ID and MasterID, and clicked the Join button (refer to Figure 8).

Now click Finish button, and PowerPoint will generate a presentation from the Access database.

Have your ever used keyboard shortcuts and sequences in PowerPoint? Or are you a complete keyboard aficionado?
Do you want to learn about some new shortcuts? Or do you want to know if your favorite keyboard shortcuts are documented?